16-Channel Video Installation, 16 x HD 1080p 4'30'' Stereo
Non-Places deals with urbanization and globalization in the digital age.
In the synchronized videos, the user moves through visual worlds posted publicly by others on social networks such as Flickr, Freesound, Twitter and YouTube. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a virtual journey in which one experiences local, cultural and linguistic differences and similarities. In virtual space, this information is visualized on cubes that rise at different heights to become a skyline. One unspecific place that could be anywhere in the world. The work deals with how our cities are continuously changing and increasingly resemble one. This results in more and more non-places/places of lost places in the sense of Marc Augé’s book and essay Non-Places, which could exist all over the world without any true local identity. Like motorways, airports, hotel rooms or shopping malls.
The videos are screenshots of the virtual reality work 10.000 Moving Cities – Same but Different, VR (Virtual Reality)
Introduction: Johannes Auer
Translated from German
Exhibition opening Galerie b, 31.05.2017
Marc Lee: Non-Places
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to welcome you to the exhibition Non-Places by Marc Lee, whom I also warmly welcome here.
Marc Lee is one of the most important and internationally recognised net artists from Switzerland. His works have been and continue to be shown at major media art exhibitions around the world. And, fortunately, his global radius of action also occasionally touches on Stuttgart. For example, in 2012 he was once before in Stuttgart with the magnificent exhibition 3 Works: Anflug – Schlagzeilen – Orte here at Galerie b.
Marc Lee experiments with information and communication technologies and audiovisualises data streams from the Internet. In doing so, he achieves a perfect balance between show value and conceptual clarity, something that characterises his art in particular. In doing so, he achieves a perfect balance between show value and conceptual clarity, something that characterises his art in particular.
Non-Places is the name of the current exhibition and a link can certainly be made to the 2012 installation, where location and space also played a significant role: the work ‘Anflug’ (Approach) used Google Earth to create a synchronised flight towards this building from 16 directions – in relation to the orientation of the 16 screens in Galerie b. The Stuttgart City Library thus became the centre of the world, a specific place of longing in a city to which literally all roads led.
The exhibition Non-Places, on the other hand, negates the specific location. In the synchronised videos, public text and image worlds from social networks such as Flickr, Freesound, Twitter, Panoramio and YouTube are projected onto the cubic skyline of an imaginary city. The abstract city body is literally localised by the respective location-based social media postings and can then be named. The viewer participates in the social interactions and undertakes a virtual journey into ever new image, video and sound collages. Local, cultural and linguistic differences become visible, but are simultaneously cancelled out by the similarities that become apparent. Communication processes that are similar to one another create a sameness. An unspecific place that could be anywhere in the world.
The installation thus thematises how our world and our places are becoming more and more alike. It creates ‘non-places’ in the sense of Marc Augé, which could be anywhere in the world without a local identity: Motorways, airports, skyscrapers, hotel rooms and shopping centres.
The word “non-places” has a double connotation. On the one hand, it refers to Marc Augé’s book of the same name from 1991, in which the continuous increase in non-places in our cities, in our world and in our experience points to an increasingly dystopian experience of loneliness. Dystopia literally means a bad place. On the other hand, ‘non-place’ is the literal translation of the Greek term ‘utopia’, the dream of a visionary, ideal place.
The city has always been associated with both. With the ideal of utopia and the beacon of dystopia. The city as utopia, as a dream and ideal place of longing, was already outlined in antiquity by Plato and Aristotle. In the Middle Ages, city air literally made people free, and in the Renaissance, Alberti, for example, took up the ancient ideas of the ideal city again. Ideal cities built in the Baroque period include Mannheim and Karlsruhe. In the 1950s, Lucio Costa and Oskar Niemeyer set the precedent for a built utopia with Brasilia. These concepts are still echoed today in Waterfont City Dubai and Lingang New City near Shanghai.
Digital theorists such as Marshall McLuhan also turned the place into a utopia with the concept of the global village. Put simply, McLuhan saw the archaic tribal society as the golden age of orality, which appealed to all the senses equally. The fall from grace – namely written culture – with its reduction to a single, visual sense, could, McLuhan predicted, be overcome again through technical media prostheses – the extension of men. In the global village of the Internet society, he hoped, mankind would find its way back to pre-alphabetic sensory synaesthesia and thus to unalienated happiness around the media campfire of the displays and loudspeakers of our digital communication devices with vibrating alarms that appeal to all the senses.
The city as a dystopia, on the other hand, is almost always associated with human flaw and presumption. I will spare you another historical tour de force and only refer to Babel, which, according to history, challenged God with its presumptuous tower construction and was punished with multilingualism, i.e. communicative failure. Sodom and Gomorrah were hit even harder. And – a huge leap – the technical presumption of humans to be able to create technical images of themselves – so-called replicants – the technical presumption is reflected in the legendary SF film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott in a city setting in which the sun literally no longer rises, in which it is always raining and which is optically defined by advertising video walls that monologue the people. Incidentally, this visually saturated advertising dystopia is currently being congenially updated in the cinema in the live-action adaptation of ‘Ghost in the Shell’.
Marc Lee’s installation Non-Places is iconographically very much in the tradition of ‘Blade Runner’. The monological non-communication of the billboards also reverberates in Non-Places. ‘The mediation that creates the bond between individuals and their surroundings in the space of the ‘non-place’ takes place via words and texts (…) via signs of road traffic…’ such as “categorise on the right”, or via prohibitions such as “no smoking” or information such as “welcome (…)”, according to Marc Augé.
This mediation between the individual and the environment in the ‘non-place’ is therefore just as monological as the advertising messages on the billboards in Blade Runner. Marc Lee reinforces this finding by showing how our social media postings are similar in terms of structure, form and content despite their abundance: A selfie is a selfie is a selfie. ‘Where are you right now?’ is the stereotypical initial question of every smartphone communication. The stereotypical nature of our social media postings is not an offer of communication, but a monologue proclaiming what is always the same. Marc Augé ends his book ‘Non-places’ with the conclusion: ‘So tomorrow – perhaps today – (…) we will have reason and space for an ethnology of loneliness.’ (S.120)
Marc Lee’s marvellous video installation shows that this ‘perhaps’ has already become a certainty. The cold beauty of the urban landscapes of Non-Places, on whose screen the monologues of loneliness are reflected, exposes utopia as a literal non-place – as a reflection of the cold beauty of our lonely digital existence.